Lucile slid the sketch of the ball gown across her desk to Elinor. “I can’t believe you’re going to be a guest in imperial Russia. Thank heavens I’ve designed for Russian nobles before.”
“As if,” Elinor said, squinting at the drawing, “I’m noble too. Ha!”
“It’s going to be cold there, so I’ve tried to strike a balance between bare throat for your necklace but a higher décolletage and cap sleeves. Some velvet inlay because that will keep you warmer than satin and lace everywhere. And it flows.”
Elinor heaved a huge sigh. “It flows like money. I can’t thank you and Cosmo enough for the loan, and I will pay it back.”
“You will, not Clayton?”
“You can see he’s to be trusted for nothing but eating, drinking, and being merry, even as our ship goes down. I’ve had several people dear to me offer a loan, but—”
“Several people,” Lucile echoed, putting down her sketch pen and leaning closer. She put her elbows on the table and her chin on her clenched hands. “Including Lord Curzon?”
“He is a dear friend, an adviser. We have many interests in common, the classics, for example, and travel. And I adore hearing about his days in India.”
“Excellent change of topic, madam authoress. But you are seeing him in private?”
“For long lunches, so don’t you read more in. I am yet faithful—physically faithful—to Clayton.”
“I must tell you people are talking.”
“Let them. I’m used to that after becoming the notorious author Elinor Glyn of Three Weeks. I know it didn’t help that I tried to produce it as a play with my own money, until the wretched, priggish Lord Chamberlain banned it—when I had totally toned down the scandal in it everyone was expecting to see! So yes, then that was money down the drain in tough times, but it was my money, and I’d planned to make a windfall from it.”
“I know. But a woman who bought some frocks last week here—a good many of them—said I should actually warn you to steer clear of Lord Curzon.”
“What?” Elinor said sitting up straighter. “Warn me? And are you? Who was she, one of his so-called Souls, I suppose.”
“Let me not answer that, since I promised I would not use her name. But the Souls? What sort of group is that?”
“A clique of Lord Curzon’s longtime friends, mostly women, who dare to advise him on his personal life. They didn’t even like his wife, said she was a social-climbing American, when I know from what he’s said she loved him dearly and waited years until he proposed. But these so-called Souls are meddlers in his life and now mine!”
“You said you two are just friends, so guard yourself and guard your heart.”
“Too late for that, big sister,” Elinor admitted and fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief. “I’m deeply in love with him, whatever happens. I feared his ‘blessed Souls’ would speak against me. I’m not worthy of him, that’s what they must believe, though he speaks well of them and hasn’t said they are talking me down.”
“Would you divorce Clayton for him?”
“And then think he’d marry a divorced woman, the immoral author? He’s an honorable, idealistic, grand man with an important, public reputation who aims high, to be in the cabinet, perhaps to be conservative prime minister someday.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Lately, we have had a tiff. He advises against my going to Russia, however much I’m to be feted there, shown simply everything, and get a new book out of it. He believes Russia is a dark place, a powder keg, he said, just waiting for something dreadful to happen, especially after that so-called Bloody Sunday massacre when the czar ordered peaceful protesters fired upon.”
“He’s right that was terrible. And to think he’s cousin to our Prince of Wales.”
“Well, I must go,” Elinor said, popping up. “I’ll stop by here myself for the gown and the frocks you’ve done for Margot for finishing school. I’ll be taking her there myself and stopping at Heidelberg on the way back.”
“Heidelberg? Whatever for? On your own? You said you weren’t taking Williams with you just to drop Margot off. Elinor, you are blushing.”
“It’s warm in here,” she said, fanning her face. “I must run and I do thank you for putting my gowns on a tab lately. What would I ever do without you?”
“Probably be able to keep a safer secret that you must be meeting someone in scenic Heidelberg on the way home, perhaps for a liaison, perhaps someone whose name I could guess.”
Elinor turned back at the door. “If you must know, despite the ruin of my marriage and my finances, George Curzon is the light of my life right now.” She pulled the door open and ran right into Cosmo.
“Elinor, leaving?” he asked. “Are you all right? Both of you?” he added with a glance in at Lucile, who had followed Elinor toward the door.
“Onward and upward, dear Cosmo,” Elinor told him. She looked back at Lucile and added, “Here’s to Heidelberg!”
“My love, I can’t believe we’ve managed this,” George told her and swept her into his arms. “Privacy—real privacy at last where no one knows us.”
He had been waiting at the Heidelberg hotel for her, sitting at a back table in the little first-floor restaurant where they had agreed to meet. “Your luggage?” he asked as he pulled out the other chair for her.
She didn’t mind that she was looking only at the oak-paneled wall behind him, because she was, at last, really alone and looking at only him.
“It’s at the front desk to be taken up to the room. I registered as you said, Mrs. Nathaniel, and they said you were already here and in the Rotrosen Room.”
“So my middle name Nathaniel is worth something for once. Sit, sit, then we’ll go up for a while before dinner. So lovely to be open about this and not behind closed doors, though I relish the idea of that. Does anyone know you’re here and not staying longer in Dresden?”
“Lucile. But she doesn’t know where. I vow, she reads minds—mine, at least. She guessed. I didn’t exactly tell her.”
He gestured to the waiter for a glass of wine for her. “And she said?”
“She said one of your Souls bought a gown and warned her to warn me to stay away from you.”
His high forehead, so aristocratic, furrowed right to the high bridge of his aquiline nose. “They have no right, and I’ll tell them so,” he promised. “They are another reason we are here instead of at some rural inn in the Cotswolds.”
“You are too well known for even there.”
“Mostly my name. And you too—your name. So we shall consider ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel here,” he asked, looking intently at her, as her wine arrived.
“It’s a lovely fantasy—the best fiction I could imagine,” she said, blinking back tears.
“We shall make time both fly and stand still.” He raised his glass to clink it against hers. “Not three weeks, but nearly three days. Just two people in love.”
“Yes!” she said. “Oh yes.”
Here she was on a train, having left cold Russia behind and she was still heated by the memory of her and George’s passionate days and nights together in Heidelberg two months ago. The countryside near Warsaw, Poland, blurred by. She had cut short her visit to Russia because everything had gone wrong.
The worst was that Clayton had written that creditors were actually knocking at their door in rural Essex. She had to go home to see her publisher to get some sort of advance, promise something serialized, a new novel quickly—anything for some money. She’d managed to get them out of dire debt once, but this was even worse. Next their creditors would be hounding her and the girls.
Besides that, her time in Russia, armed as she was with new gowns and accessories, had been ruined by the death of Czar Nicholas’s uncle, which had plunged the entire court into mourning black of which she had none. Events were canceled, her plans disrupted, though she did manage a tour of the Winter Palace. Her maid, Williams, had become ill, so she’d sent her home and replaced her temporarily with a Russian maid—a sullen girl with whom she could barely communicate.
However, she had been helped by a Russian official to get this string of tickets home, at least as far as Warsaw. She was to stay in the Hotel de l’Europe tonight, then take a train to Berlin tomorrow morning. She would be met there, according to the man who had kindly made her arrangements, by a carriage to take her to the hotel.
She was so physically and emotionally drained she couldn’t wait to get to a bed. Her head was nodding and kept jerking her neck, though her mind wandered again. How sweet and thrilling it had been to curl up in bed against George after their lovemaking, to put her head on his bare shoulder. Before he undressed her, he had rid himself of that terrible iron contraption he’d worn since he was a boy. He had been freed to be himself with her, a daring, darling man. Even in their lovemaking he was controlled, but wonderfully so. He had teased her to tell him what was her coded, private name for him in her diary, but she had not told him. She had two of them, one Milor, short for my lord, and Superior Person, or S.P. Both pet names would show him she adored him and that wasn’t good for—
“Warsaw! Warsaw!” the conductor cried. Then he said in several languages, “For this train, end of the line, end of the line.”
A muted screeching sound and jolt further woke her from her daydream—or night dream. Despite the lights in the train station, it seemed dark. Few people were on the platform and few other trains moving. Oh, so unusual to be on her own, to be carrying just a dressing case all the way home while her luggage was sent. Just outside the entrance, as she’d been told, there was to be a waiting carriage. And, once she disembarked and walked out, there was one.
Two dark-suited men were on the high box seat. She was so used to seeing the newfangled motorcars at home or at least small cabriolets in the city that she hesitated.
“Madame Glyn?” the man beside the driver asked and climbed down. “Let me help you in and pass your luggage in. Then we’ll be off.”
“Just this bag,” she told him. His face was in shadow under his brimmed hat. His accent seemed Russian, not that she could pick out a Polish one. “To the Hotel l’Europe, you understand,” she said.
“Da, madame.”
Was da how to say yes in Polish as well as Russian? Well, all she wanted was a good night’s sleep, and she was grateful to her Russian contact for this carriage.
But she was disturbed, then appalled, at how fast the vehicle went. They plunged into a dim neighborhood through nearly deserted streets. Surely they could not be heading toward the center of Warsaw to a hotel.
Despite the blast of icy air, she opened the window and shouted to the driver, “The Hotel l’Europe! Here in Warsaw!”
Her stomach cramped when he said nothing and the carriage plunged on. Her creative mind snagged on one plot possibility: She was being abducted. But by whom and to where?
“Don’t cry, lass,” Cosmo said and pulled her into his arms when they read the post that their bid for the Paris shop had been rejected. “And don’t take it out on me. I said I would support you on a Paris opening of Lady Duff-Gordon when the time is right and ripe, but this indicates it isn’t. We must concentrate on the London and New York stores and save Paris for another day.”
“Another year, you mean.” Standing in their London parlor, she leaned into his strength, yet she couldn’t help but think he was secretly pleased. Her husband might be a cosmopolitan Cosmo, as she had often teased him—when it came to London, at least—but he was at heart a Scottish Highlander. And Scots, as generous and well-off as Cosmo was, were known to watch their money and stay home in the Highlands. He’d looked at the prices to lease or buy other shops in Paris, even in a suburban arrondissement instead of the city itself, and said the other places except for this one were too risky a financial venture for now.
“But both my shops are making money like hay at haying time,” she protested now, trying not to whine or scold. Their big St. Bernard, Porthos, pressed against her, nearly toppling them while their Peke, Mr. Futze, cavorted, yapping as if scolding her for protesting.
“But you’ve been spending money hand over fist on the new craze of fashion photography and buying promotions in the papers. So,” Cosmo said, “when there is enough to secure both the London and New York stores in case times change—”
“Times change? You mean the king being so ill? Surely no war is on the horizon, certainly not in France.”
“Germany is unstable. But that aside, again, I promise we shall lease or buy a Paris shop and house when it is time. Lass, I know you are used to having things your way—”
“I am not. Don’t you recall how long you made me wait for my first shop?”
“And how long I made you wait to entice me into marriage?”
“I did not!” she insisted, but then realized he was trying to cajole her. “Indeed, though,” she added, swiping at her tears, “good things are worth waiting for.”
“My beautiful lass—with a good brain,” he said, lifting her chin and quickly kissing her. “Just to make it up to you, I’ll go with you to your dear New York City, and you can show me the shop and the sites. You talked about wanting a motorcar and a small place on Big Island, so—”
“It’s Long Island. And yes, I long for both.”
“Righto. Your sister will be back soon from her daft jaunt to Russia, and the Titanic’s maiden voyage is to be quite some time after her return, so I will be sure we get first-class tickets. You can go back on your own once before that, but I promise you a braw, bonnie time with a devoted husband after that.”
“Then your very-much-in-love wife promises you that the two of us together will have an exciting time on the Titanic.”